How much power does an RTX 4090 Draw ?

[trs96]

Was watching an Asus Tuf build video on Youtube. Was shocked to see the power this new Nvidia card consumes.
This is just for gaming. Many things you can do with a PC that will draw much more power than this. Even the i9-3900K
can use up to 300W of power at any given time. The builder used a 1200W PSU for this build !!

 

[c-o-pr]

In 1997, 1 TFLOPS supercomputer pulled 1 MW

ASCI Red - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

25 years later, 80 TFLOPS GPU takes less than 500W.

It's not uncommon to use 1000W PS for a high-end desktop rig, which is
necessary, but ample to cover 13900K max OC, the 4080, 128Gs, plus all the trimmings

What stands out to me is that we prolly have gone well over the knee of the curve of possible performance improvements with todays physics for a given power envelope.

There's no more upside. 1000W for a PC seems like the practical max limited by standard 120V/15A household circuit, assuming you'll always want headroom to plug in something else.

Are there any obvious areas for improving efficiency? Raw perf may even go backwards with next process density advances.

13900 and 4080 show us that packing more perf is gonna require proportionally more power. Both seek bragging rights in precisely these terms, by pushing the upper limit of consumption.

That kit is gonna make your room hot. And current draw may melt power connectors.

When your PC catches on fire, you've got a real computer problem.

All this suggests the next leap in computing has to be about SW—about how the HW is applied.

Will SW enable the price/perf trends of the last 25 years to continue?

My prediction is yes, but only if we radically change the nature of the work a PC does.

I say the future looks like task specific chiplets with a new OS.